If I’m so connected, why do I feel so disconnected?

If I’m so connected, why do I feel so disconnected?

by Amelia G : February 8th, 2009

livejournal myspace twitter facebookI enjoyed LiveJournal because sometimes I have fragments of ideas which are not ready to be an official article, but it is nice to be able to start giving the words shape. I also felt like I could actually get to know people on there. Like, if I met someone at a rock show, we could exchange info and continue getting to know one another. I was extremely bugged, however, when I started seeing people out at night and I’d ask them how they were and be told to read their LJ. Why bother leaving the house if you refuse to have a conversation? Over time, people started taking LJ more and more seriously. This meant that, first of all, that, if I complained about work on there, some dick would take it as uber-personally and big deal as if I had sent out a press release and posted “I had a hard day because blah blah” to every high traffic site I operate. Secondly, there started to be too many people on my LJ list for me to keep up with what everyone was up to. Most disappointingly, treating LJ as a publishing platform rather than a diary meant that other people started writing less and less personal entries and more and more press release-like entries which had more to do with how they wish to be perceived than who they truly are.

At first, I hated MySpace because it seemed like a service whose only application was to allow other people access to my Rolodex without having to say “thanks for the introduction”. Then I also hated MySpace because it seemed to pull audience from LJ, which I had enjoyed the interactivity of, and MySpace didn’t really seem to . . .

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